Bandit Lites Brightens Austin City Limits Festival

	Austin City Limits. Photo: Julian Bajsel

Bandit Lites wrapped its final festival for the summer with two astounding weekends at the Austin City Limits Music Festival, where beautiful weather under the big Texas sky in Zilker Park was the setting to more than 130 acts. Bandit worked with C3 Presents to provide the festival lighting package for two of the main stages, giving headliners such as LCD Soundsystem, Mumford and Sons, and Kendrick Lamar the flexibility and versatility to seamlessly blend in their own touring looks.

Seth Jackson, who is in his fourth year of designing the festival rigs for ACL, collaborated with the headlining artists in a three-fold process, by first providing a large enough rig to fit on the scale of the large roof structures.

"Second, you need to provide familiar and varied fixtures," he continued. "Most of the lighting designers coming in have existing show files. You need a rig that allows them to clone or match fixtures from their normal rig. That makes for a better show and easier day for everyone. The third is to provide space for the headliner. Often they are using part of the festival rig and adding their own custom elements. We tend to stay fairly simple on the truss layout so that space is there for them. If you do 14 sticks of truss running up to down stage, you'll end up having to take a lot of it out every night to make room. Bandit supplied more than 250 fixtures for both the Honda and Samsung Stages including ETC Source Fours, Lycian M2 Spots, Philips Vari-Lite VL 3500 Spots, VL 3500 Washes, VL 3000 Spots, Claypaky Sharpys, Bandit's exclusive GRNLite Pars, Martin by Harman Atomic 3000 Strobes, and MA Lighting grandMA 2 Full consoles for control.

"A little planning ahead at the Tetris game can go a long way," Jackson said. "Mostly it is the coordination between project manager Jimmy Hatten and Shawn Lear with our artist advance. Things like additional network lines are a simple thing, but if they get missed, it could be a show stopper."

One major signature spectacle, the ACL Festival pyramid was comprised of 22 Syncrolite SXL's placed around the park, where 600' to 1,000' of strategically placed cable ran between each fixture. Bandit's crew for the weekends included Andy French, Jimmy Murray, Ty Veneziano, Chase Bosworth, Kam Finley, Hap Prater, Elizabeth Weller, and Shawn Worlow.

Both Jackson and Bandit's client representative Lear attributed the success for a festival of this scale to the attention to detail of all the moving parts.

"After three years, we have developed a great working system between myself, Bandit, and C3 Presents," said Jackson. "With so much information from so many artists flying back and forth, Bandit has been instrumental to our process of keeping it all organized."

"The best part of working with C3 Presents is in the fact their employees are professional, knowledgeable, and fun," echoed Lear. "Production manager Brandon Sossamon's expertise, guidance, and wisdom in handling all facets of production is nothing short of amazing. Bandit Lites is privileged to be involved with C3's brilliant staff and crew that make Austin City Limits one the nation's top music festivals."